


We Just Decided To

by ishie



Category: Go On (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cheating, Cheekbones - Keira Knightley, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 00:29:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lauren tried not to panic. This was do-able. She could still totally do this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Just Decided To

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellolamppost17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellolamppost17/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Kacey! I rewatched 1x21 for the cheekbones and had to do it. 
> 
> Thanks to L for the beta!

Lauren tried not to panic. This was do-able. She could still totally do this. She could get out of the wedding. They hadn't exhausted all the options yet. "You know what? You can't tell him. I can't tell him. This is a sign from the universe! I'm going to have to cheat on him."

"That's— Um. Is that really the only option left here? I mean, there's like twelve hours left until your wedding." Ryan looked at his watch. "Welllll, more like eight. You're having a ceremony at dawn at the Santa Monica Pier."

"What?"

"It's romantic!" He leaned in and dropped his voice. "And wait until you see the suit Wyatt's going to wear."

"Who _are_ you?"

" _I don't know!_ Is he a witch? He's got to be a witch!"

Lauren grabbed him by the lapels and yanked. 

"Ow!"

"Quiet! Ryan, you have to help me fix this. You _have_ to."

"Fine!"

He leaned in, lips pursed and eyes screwed shut. Lauren recoiled—

"Ew, no!"

—but she forgot to let go of his jacket. They stumbled backward a few feet, knocking into the huge wooden blinds. 

"Go!" she hissed, pushing Ryan away. "We have to get out of here before they notice we're gone!"

She risked a look back over her shoulder to see if anyone had seen them crash into the window. Instead of grinding and getting his baby oil all over anyone, the stripper was lounging where Fausta and Mr. K had been sitting and it looked like....

"Oh, _God_."

"Yeah, okay," Ryan said, sounding both horrified and confused, "first stop: bleach. We're bleaching both of our eyes. I might set mine on fire."

\---

"I really still think I'm your best option here."

Lauren ignored him. Her options were slim, but: no. Nope. "Do you have your phone with you? I left mine at the restaurant."

Ryan pulled his from a pocket and flipped it over to her. "What good's that going to do?"

"Look, no judgements, okay? I'm doing this for Wyatt."

"You're doing this for you, Lauren. If you were doing it for Wyatt, you'd have told him yourself."

"Okay, who died and made you Mr. Advice... Guy."

"Uh, my wife?"

Her options widened considerably once she started to consider choking on her own idiot foot. "I'm so sorry. I don't know why I said that."

Ryan reached over and squeezed her knee, a surprisingly genuine gesture. "Don't worry about it. You're at least half the reason I can make a terrible joke about it."

"I had a lot to drink tonight."

He took his hand back and turned onto an entrance ramp for the 405. "So, who you gonna call?"

"Steven."

For a guy who had made a fairly impressive career out of doing live talk radio and flying by the seat of his pants, Ryan really had a _terrible_ reaction time.

\---

"Thanks for coming to get us, Steven. I appreciate it _so_ much." Lauren let herself have a moment and touched his arm, running her hand up from his wrist to his elbow.

Ryan snorted. "You could appreciate it a little less, maybe."

She kicked him in the ankle and smiled at Steven. Maybe it was a step too far, but she was a wild woman! This was all part of the plan! Okay, it wasn't, but she wasn't dead. There was a spark here. Sure, she didn't want it to fan into anything now, if ever, but Steven's cheekbones were just this side of deadly in the flickering light of the tow-truck pulling Ryan's Porsche out of a ditch.

_Focus, Lauren!_

Steven coughed, and coughed. The fakest, loudest cough she'd heard this side of Anne trying to explain why she couldn't make it to the pancake breakfast at Yolanda's church. 

"Sorry," he rasped. "I think I've got that big nasty virus that's going around. Like, I'm hacking up a lung and my stomach is doing backflips and I can't stop shi—"

"Oh, for God's sake!" Ryan squawked. "She doesn't _really_ want to sleep with you!"

Steven did a double take. "You don't?" 

Lauren shook her head. "No, it's just for show. I just need it to _look_ like I want to sleep with you." She paused for a second. If this really was the night she would start the next chapter of her life, she should start like she meant to go on: with 100% total honesty. 

...Once she tricked her fiance into thinking she had cheated on him so he would back out of the wedding, anyway. But there was no time like the present to start _practicing_ for being 100% totally honest.

Steven mussed his hair and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, slouching a little and dropping his head so his eyes were shadowed. He looked like a freaking model. "How about now?"

"Um...?"

No, it was probably best to start with the honesty _after_ she lied to Wyatt.

\---

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

It was kind of sweet of Steven to keep asking if she was sure she wanted to go through with this asinine plan. But after hearing him ask literally once every five minutes for the last hour, Lauren was ready to chuck him out the window and run for Santa Monica. 

"I'm sure. Be quiet."

They'd been sitting on separate ends of the couch for almost three hours, waiting for Wyatt to come home. In the dark. Half-dressed. 

Lauren had a sneaking suspicion he was out looking for her. She had promised to check in with him at least once during the bachelorette party—neither of them really believing that Yolanda would make good on her joking threat to kidnap the bride and spirit her away to a tropical island, but still. Safety first. 

When she didn't call and didn't answer her phone, he'd probably jumped in the car to track down the party. She'd expected that he'd come home at _some_ point, though. What if she'd come home early? Wasn't he even going to check?

"Typical," she muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Look, Lauren, you can probably tell I'm not so sure about this plan. I mean, Wyatt's a great guy. Like, a genuine good guy. He brought muffins for the office when he came to see Ryan earlier."

"The cranberry orange spice?"

"I thought I'd died and gone to carb heaven."

"Right?"

"Do you really want to do this to him? If you don't want to go through with the wedding, wouldn't it be better to just talk to him?"

"Well, of course it would! Why do you think I'm doing this?!"

Steven was quiet for a few seconds, and when he spoke again, his voice was much deeper. "Is this some kind of weird threesome thing?"

She ignored the little ping that made her want to say yes. "No!"

"Okay," he said, his voice back to normal. "Because for the record I would totally not be into that. At all. Ever. No way would I be into that, at all."

"Uh-huh."

"That's not a thing I would be into. Unless, you know..."

"Let's move on."

To his credit, he switched gears like a champ. "Why is pretending to cheat better than just telling him you don't want to marry him?"

"Because," Lauren picked at the fringe on the blanket she'd wrapped around herself when it became obvious Wyatt wouldn't be walking in any time soon. "I don't know. Because I don't want him to feel like the bad guy. It's not his fault I don't want to marry him, not really. I mean, he's so perfect I want to vomit sometimes, but that's not on him. It's on me."

Lights passed over the ceiling as a car drove by. 

"I just thought.... I don't know. I thought if we did this, then he could hate me for cheating on him. That's a real, concrete reason. It's something you can tell your friends. Write in your Christmas newsletter. Euphemize for your dead grandmother when you bake bread together in the middle of the night."

Guessing at the look on Steven's face, she added, "It's a thing. Just go with it."

"And talking to him...?"

"Then he would blame himself. He'd wonder what he did wrong, when the answer is he didn't do anything wrong! He did everything perfectly! I just don't want to marry him. I don't know if I want to marry anyone."

A lamp that sat between the couch and the door flipped on. She got the barest glimpse of Steven in his boxers before she went mostly blind from the light.

"What the hell?"

"In about thirty seconds, you're going to realize that you're acting more like Ryan King than any adult human has a right to act, and you're going to kick me out of here. I'm just going to go first and save you the trouble."

Lauren pulled the blanket the rest of the way over her head, so she sat in a dark, hot, humid, linty, poly-blend cave. "I really hate it when other people are right."

"You were right first, though, otherwise you wouldn't have come up with doing all this to avoid it."

There was a rustle of fabric, and a zipper, then another. His hand landed on her shoulder and gave a brisk rub.

"Really hoping this is what I was aiming for," he said.

She poked her head out of the blanket and blew the hair out of her face. "I should probably thank you for not being a jerk."

"Hey, I can be a jerk! You just caught me on a bad night." He smiled, putting those cheekbones to good use yet again, damn him. "Good luck."

"Now that, I will thank you for." She stood and followed him to the door. "Listen, uh, could you not tell Ryan what happened in here? I'll talk to him tomorrow."

"No problem. It's probably going to be a while before he forgives me for locking him in my car all this time, anyway."

"I've never seen anyone so confused by child-locks in my life. Not even _actual_ babies."

"One of his many charms." 

When he turned to go, Lauren reached out and brushed her hand along his arm again. "Steven, thank you. Really."

He flipped up the collar of his coat—he knew what doing that did to people, right? He had to know what that did—and shot her a pair of finger guns, which kind of ruined the effect. 

Kind of.

"Any time you want to do it for real," he said, wincing a little at his own word choice, "you know who to call."

"Yeah, okay, get out."

But she was grinning when she said it, and she didn't stop until Wyatt came home.


End file.
